Jock Forbes and His Father's Land Sighting at Inverfarigaig, Loch Ness

Loch Ness, 1919. The First World War had ended a few months earlier. The loch was still a quiet Highland water, fourteen years away from the publicity of 1933.

The Forbes family farmed at Foyers Mains on the south east shore. Alexander Forbes had taken over the farm in 1907. The road home from Inverness ran through Dores and along General Wade's Military Road, today the B852. Inverfarigaig, a hamlet at the mouth of the River Farigaig, was the last stop before Foyers. Wooded slopes on one side. The loch on the other.

A stormy night in February 1919. Young Jock Forbes and his father were returning from Inverness in their pony cart. As they neared Inverfarigaig, the pony suddenly started and backed away.

Jock and his father peered ahead. There was something crossing the road. It was coming out of the forest and ambling towards the loch. As they tried to calm the pony, they became aware that whatever was in the road before them was a very big animal.

Then it splashed into the water. Jock's father murmured to himself in Gaelic. They spurred the pony forward and rushed home. Jock later recalled that they never spoke of the incident again.

The account surfaced decades later, when Jock told it himself. It first appeared in print in Nicholas Witchell's The Loch Ness Story, first published in 1974. In Witchell's version, as paraphrased by Roland Watson, their horse reared up and stopped as something large and dark crossed the road in front of them, followed by a splash. No 1919 newspaper report has been found. No tracks. No photographs.

Jock grew up to run Foyers Mains. He married Elizabeth Macfarlane in 1936 and raised five children. A film in the National Library of Scotland's Moving Image Archive, titled "MONSTER, the", includes farmer Jock Forbes speaking on camera. Whether he tells the 1919 story there has not been confirmed.

In 2013, Roland Watson met Jock's son, Donald Forbes, at his campsite at Lower Foyers. Donald was of the opinion that his father "did not see anything", since "the form before them was not readily discernible". He suggested that they had actually seen a bull which had escaped from the market. Watson's reply: "An interesting suggestion, though one I would not accept myself!"

The conditions were hard. Night. A storm. A frightened pony. A boy remembering decades later. Yet every version of the story ends the same way. With a splash.

The Forbes account belongs to a small group of land sightings reported at Loch Ness before 1933. Cryptomundo lists 1919 among those early years. A separate 1919 case, from Mrs Peter Cameron, described a head like a camel on a long neck with four limbs. On the same shore road, George Spicer would report a creature crossing between Dores and Foyers in July 1933, and Arthur Grant followed in January 1934. The pony near Inverfarigaig had shied years before either of them.